Rated 2 out of 5 stars

by blueboy56 on Aug. 1, 2008 · permalink

Tbird 2.0.0.16. Installed this add-on. Went to Tools -> Add-Ons, selected this add-on, clicked the Options button. What did I get? A title bar (with no text) without a window pane under it. So if there are options, this add-on won't show them. If there are no options, why is the Options button not disabled? I configured Outlook 2002 to send in RTF format (and also had to configure the Internet option to use RTF when sending to Internet recipients to prevent converting to HTML). I used bold, italics, coloring, and font sizes in the test message. When received in Tbird (and with Lookout installed and enabled), bold and italics were there but no coloring or font size changes. The winmail.dat attachment was there (as can also be seen in source view for the "Content-Type: application/ms-tnef; name="winmail.dat" MIME part). I double-clicked on the winmail.dat attachment to open it figuring that maybe their helper requires it be opened to get at the formatting instructions inside (although obviously it should've already seen the MIME part holding the winmail.dat content). Nope, that just had me prompted for a helper app but none were shown. ALso shown as an attachment in the message view pane was an .rtf file. This file is NOT listed in the source view of the message; that is, there is no MIME part for this attachment. So I double-click on it and got prompted as to what to use to open it. Wordpad was shown (and so was Other for browsing to a program but then supposedly Outlook wouldn't be installed on a host where I needed to use this add-on). I used WordPad and could see the bold, italics, coloring, and font size changes - but then WordPad has always been able to render *some* (not all) formatting in RTF files. It is, after all, an RTF application. To check the WordPad selection was not part of Lookout's undocumented enhancement to Tbird, I uninstalled Lookout, restart Tbird, and re-selected the RTF formatted test e-mail. This time there was no .rtf virtual attachment shown in the message view pane, so Lookout adds that. What it adds is a test that there is a winmail.dat file and then presents an .rtf attachment in addition (that isn't in the e-mail itself) that you can use to load the e-mail into WordPad. Yet their web site says they wrote a TNEF decoder. No, they did not write WordPad. If they had written a decoder then why doesn't the e-mail display *inside* of Tbird rather than have me select to open it in WordPad? Their entire usage description is "When LookOut is working, you will see the names of the TNEF encapsulated file attachments next to the winmail.dat file. The user interaction is transparent i.e. There are no special dialogs or menu items, etc." Okay, so I see the .rtf file and have to guess that is what they mean by the encapsulated file. They don't mention that you have to open the attachment to see the message in its RTF format. They talk about a decoder which should present that formatting within the message view pane inside of Tbird but instead you have to use WordPad to view the formatting. So what does their decoder do? Extract the .rtf file out of the winmail.dat file so WordPad can read it? It does work (because it shows the .rtf content as a pseudo-attachment that you can open) but it is clumsy because the user has to read it outside of Tbird (to load it into WordPad). I guess it works, sort of.